Stephanie Buscemi: ‘Finally, I am in a place where what I am wearing doesn’t matter.’
Photograph: PR

Enterprise technology veteran Stephanie Buscemi, COO of Salesforce’s cloud business, knows all too well the challenges facing women in her industry. “Success means having engineering experience, and it can be a hard hill to climb,” she explains. “Being a technology executive also requires leadership acumen, technology know-how, and sales. Add on being a women, and the talent pool gets narrowed to a really small population.” I asked Buscemi to share some of the key lessons she has learned in the process of climbing the corporate ladder in a “man’s world.”

You don’t have to act like a man to succeed in tech

Starting her career as the only woman in a sea of men, Buscemi believed that she needed to “dress like a man and act like a man” in order to be successful.

Many well-meaning female leadership development programmes share this belief, teaching women to negotiate, network and make decisions “like a man”. The unintended message this communicates is that there is something wrong with how women lead.

That approach often backfires. “I thought I had to emulate the men around me. I was miserable,” says Buscemi. Over time, she learned that her desire to empathise and build relationships with those around her was a strength, and worked to adapt her leadership style without losing herself in the process. “It took me a while, but I began to find a balance between sharing a bit more of my personality and learning how not to open the kimono too far!”

Don’t internalise problems or challenges

Women can sometimes internalise problems: we get inside of our own heads and make someone else’s misstep somehow our fault.

Buscemi has no qualms about admitting that navigating the corporate ladder has involved some difficult experiences, as well as positive ones. She recalls a time early in her career when she was at a sales preparation meeting and an executive made inappropriate comments about her appearance and clothing in front of her colleagues. “I had a choice to make: to be a victim and let the executive undermine my influence or to neutralise the situation and call him on it.” She chose the latter, in what turned out to be a pivotal decision.

How should you handle a situation like this? Buscemi was aware that if she chose to internalise the executive’s comments, any focus on strategy and achievement would have been derailed. The executive had to be held accountable for his actions, but not at the expense of the work that needed to be done. Buscemi chose to separate herself from the issue, and place the focus on the real problem.

She informed her superiors about the executive’s behaviour so that they could observe it. By orchestrating the conversation away from her, she was able to lead the power players towards focusing on the absurdity of remarks about physical appearance, in a conversation that was supposed to be focused on marketing and customer acquisition.

Be a role model for new talent

No longer the up-and-comer, Buscemi now invests as much of her time on the next generation of leaders as she does in building her customer base and team. An avid believer that women deserve role models and advocates in the tech industry, she is active in the Salesforce WomenSurge programme, where women are actively placed front and centre to contribute to development and strategy.

“Finally, I am in a place where what I am wearing doesn’t matter,” Buscemi explains. “What matters is bringing forward disruptive ideas. That conversation is not about imbalanced power plays. We are all on the same side, working toward the same direction.”